IITs Changes Their Engineering Admission Procedure

The Introduction of the new common engineering entrance exam JEE, made the Indian Institutes of Technology to introduce new admission procedure for engineering courses form the academic year 2013. The country's premier technical institutions have decided to drop the online counseling for admission to engineering courses, which was followed by the several years.

form the academic year 2013 all the IITs aspirants will have to go to the respective IITs in person for engineering courses admission. The decision was made after two candidates impersonated others in IIT-JEE 2012 to secure admission into IIT Bhubaneshwar and ISM Dhanbad this year.

A girl had sought admission to ISM Dhanbad by manipulating another candidate's IIT-JEE 2012 score card. She had bought the other candidate's score, and doctored the photographs, but the institute caught her out when they compared her likeness with photographs available with them, checked her thumbprints.

Even in ISM Dhanbad, Officials said, they could have been misled during the spot admission process. A boy who sought admission at IIT Bhubaneswar fled the scene when the institute called his bluff, JEE 2013 officials said. Every year more than five lakhs candidates take the test to qualify for around 10,000 seats in the 15 IITs, Banaras Hindu University and ISM Dhanbad, IIT administrators say that a few aspirants occasionally try fraudulent means.

H C Gupta, Organising Chairman of JEE (Advanced) 2013 said, "Online counseling is one of the factors facilitating such incidents. Students will only be allowed to fill the options online, and will have physical counseling at the seven IITs," All the candidates will have to produce original certificates for verification during counseling, "Unless the candidate comes in person we cannot identify fake students," he added.

After the fake students were identified, JEE 2013 officials sent a communication to all IITs to check whether any other students had manipulated the JEE 2012 admit cards. On Nov 20 when first semester students appear for the semester exams. IIT Madras faculty verified the identity of its first year students with photographs obtained during JEE 2012.

Academics Dean of IIT Madras K Ramamurthy said, "The institutes had come across instances of students trying to gain admission through fraudulent means in the past. IITs had pulled up such candidates before they gained admission by verifying their photographs when they came for the test. Efforts are also on to verify the students identities biometrically,"